A GOVERNMENT anti-fraud crackdown failed to “adequately consider” its impact on 23,000 families who saw their child benefits wrongly stripped, a National Audit Office (NAO) report found today.

The watchdog found that decisions to take away benefits based on data falsely claiming families had emigrated were coupled with a lack of experienced staff, leading them to remove PAYE checks.

The NAO found the first rollout of the crackdown did “not adequately consider the impact on claimants, suspending payments for more eligible claimants than it needed to, combined with more onerous requirements for many of them to prove their eligibility.”

HM Revenue & Customs issued two apologies last year for the botched move, telling a House of Commons select committee that 71 per cent of parents affected were actually eligible for child benefits.

Those affected included thousands of parents who had gone on holiday but the Home Office lacked records of their return into the country.

Stories of affected parents included a family who booked a trip to go to a wedding in Norway but did not end up going because the ceremony was cancelled.

Another family was recorded as having emigrated to Italy, but had in fact never taken the trip, due to their child having a seizure at the departure gate.

The initial introduction of the scheme was suspended at the end of 2025, following revelations by the Guardian and Irish investigative website The Detail, showing families were being falsely flagged as no longer living in Britain.

HMRC cross-checked flight information obtained by the Home Office with pay-as-you-earn (PAYE) data, which was meant to allow them to filter out people who were living in Britain.

Families first learned their benefits were cut after they received letters with 70 questions aimed at proving if they had emigrated.

Travellers from Northern Ireland who returned home via Dublin airport were marked as having never returned because the Home Office did not have these records.  

These were sent despite HMRC holding records of working people in Britain and paying tax.

The NAO said: “Some operational changes to the intervention did not adequately consider the impact on claimants.”

An HMRC spokesperson said it welcomed the report, adding that “they acknowledged that some mistakes were made initially, but we took swift action to put things right and strengthened our approach with extra safeguards.”